Monday, 25 July 2011

Another reply from Marky Mark

He's frustrated. Aren't we all?

Dear Dominic

Thank you for your recent emails about your journey experiences. I am very aware that reliability of services on the Paddington to Oxford route is not as good as other routes in the business or as good as it should be and we are working hard with Network Rail to address this.

On Wednesday night your service lost time leaving Reading station due to congestion and was regrettably unable to make this up by the time it arrived into Oxford. Delays to services arriving into and leaving Reading are frustrating and with the number of services passing through the station any problem has a knock on effect of causing a number of following services to also be delayed. The significant changes and £800m investment at Reading Station will provide a solution to these problems. However, this is a long term project and the benefits will not be apparent immediately. In the mean time we will try all we can to keep such delays to an absolute minimum.

Apologies also for the belated start to your day on Thursday morning, a signal problem in the Moreton-in-Marsh area caused a number of services to fall behind schedule after a signalling cable was cut adjacent to the line overnight.

Yesterday morning one of our services suffered a mechanical problem in the Acton area and despite our best efforts we were not able to get it moving in time to prevent delays to following trains, including the 0806 from Oxford.

I agree that to arrive into Paddington late two days running is very disappointing and I appreciate that you and many other passengers require and quite rightly expect to arrive into London as scheduled. We will continue to do all we can to ensure that is the case and I am sorry for the inconvenience caused by the recent problems.

Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time

"War and Peace on the Oxford to London line"

Dramatis personae

Mark Hopwood - Managing Director of First Great Western trains

Sue Evans - Director of Communications for First Great Western trains

Dominic - that's me. I'm unhappy with Mark and Sue.

About me

My name is Dominic. For two years I commuted between Oxford and London on First Great Western trains. In late June 2011, after 14 months of paying around £450 a month for utterly appalling service, I decided to speak up.

Every time my train was delayed, I wrote to the Managing Director and Director of Communications for FGW trains - and the length of my email reflected the length of that day's delay... the idea being that I would waste the same amount of their time as they had wasted mine.

I kept it up for nine months - during which time I wrote around 100,000 words in 97 letters, reflecting over 24 hours of delays to my commute.

What follows are those letters - and their replies. Nothing is edited.

(Also: thanks to all who have contacted me to say how much they've sympathised, empathised or enjoyed these letters. It means a lot, honestly.)